Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

331Administering volume snapshots
Creating instant snapshots
Splitting an instant snapshot hierarchy
Note: This operation is not supported for space-optimized instant snapshots.
The following command breaks the association between a snapshot hierarchy that has the
snapshot volume, snapvol, at its head, and its parent volume, so that the snapshot
hierarchy may be used independently of the parent volume:
# vxsnap [-f] [-g diskgroup] split snapvolume|snapvolume_set
Note: The topmost snapshot volume in the hierarchy must have been fully synchronized
for this command to succeed. Snapshots that are lower down in the hierarchy need not
have been fully resynchronized. See “Controlling instant snapshot synchronization” on
page 333 for more information.
The following command splits the snapshot hierarchy under snap2myvol from its
parent volume:
# vxsnap -g mydg split snap2myvol
Note: When applied to a volume set or to a component volume of a volume set, this
operation can result in inconsistencies in the snapshot hierarchy in the case of a system
crash or hardware failure. If the operation is applied to a volume set, the
-f (force) option
must be specified.
Displaying instant snapshot information
The vxsnap print command may be used to display information about the snapshots that
are associated with a volume.
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] print [vol]
This command shows the percentage progress of the synchronization of a snapshot or
volume. If no volume is specified, information about the snapshots for all the volumes in a
disk group is displayed. The following example shows a volume, vol1, which has a full-
sized snapshot, snapvol1 whose contents have not been synchronized with vol1:
# vxsnap -g mydg print
NAME SNAPOBJECT TYPE PARENT SNAPSHOT %DIRTY %VALID
vol1 -- volume -- -- -- 100
snapvol1_snp1volume -- snapvol1 1.30 --
snapvol1 vol1_snp1 volume vol1 -- 1.30 1.30
The %DIRTY value for snapvol1 shows that its contents have changed by 1.30% when
compared with the contents of vol1. As snapvol1 has not been synchronized with
vol1, the %VALID value is the same as the %DIRTY value. If the snapshot were partly
synchronized, the %VALID value would lie between the %DIRTY value and 100%. If the